How to provide quality of service (QoS), has been a major issue for the Internet for the past decade. Though many proposals have been put forward in the areas of differentiated and guaranteed services, none have met the needs of users and operators. Efforts have been stymied by the complexity of the Internet, its myriad systems of interconnection, and by the technological heterogeneity of these systems. They have also run up against poor general knowledge of traffic characteristics that are largely unknown. In particular, recent monitoring projects showed that Internet traffic exhibited huge variations, leading to non-stationary traffic, and thus making difficult to guarantee a stable QoS. This paper then proposes a new measurement based architecture (MBA) and its related mechanisms (as the measurement signaling protocol (MSP) for instance, aiming at signaling to network components network information in real time) suited for coping with actual non-stationary traffic, and with the actual split topology of the Internet for which each domain provides a particular QoS. The idea of our measurement based networking (MBN) approach relies on a real time analysis of traffic characteristics and QoS evolution, and on the design of mechanisms able to adapt their reactions accordingly. The benefits of MBN are illustrated on a case study: a new measurement based congestion control (MBCC) which aims at smoothing traffic (making it more stable and stationary) and optimizing the use of network resources. Some preliminary results, based on NS-2 simulations, show the perfect suitability of this new mechanism for improving traffic characteristics and multi-domain QoS in the Internet, given the complexity and variability of actual traffic.